Big Data Added $156 Billion in Revenue to Economy Last Year

Responding to growing Washington attacks on data brokers, the Direct Marketing Association is mounting its biggest defense by unveiling a new study Monday during its annual conference in Chicago. The study quantifies how much of the economy is driven by companies that use consumer-level data to market and retain consumers.

The report estimates that in 2012, the data-driven marketing economy added $156 billion in revenue to the U.S. economy and fueled more than 675,000 jobs. To put that statistic in perspective, that’s nearly half of total U.S. expenditures on marketing and advertising services (estimated at $292 billion annually), more than half the size of the entire Internet ecosystem (estimated by the IAB at $300 billion) and more than two-thirds the size of the entire e-commerce market. Their conclusions were based on interviews with about 650 companies, including online publishers like the New York Times and ESPN, ad agencies and ad networks, platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, as well as the U.S. postal service and email deployment firms like Chita Mail.